"It's Not About Winning, It's About Getting Into the Zone": Facebook is Like Gambling

On Quartz, an insanely fascinating article by Alexis Madrigal on how people like Facebook because it's like gambling. Alexis doesn't mean Facebook is addictive -- though we spend an incredible time on it. What it really is about, much like gambling on a slot machine, is getting into the zone, finding "the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop."

I know the hypnosis, as Im sure you do, too. You start clicking through photos of your friends of friends and next thing you know an hour has gone by. Its oddly soothing, but unsatisfying. Once the spell is broken, I feel like Ive just wasted a bunch of time. But while its happening, Im caught inside the machine, a human animated GIF: I. Just. Cannot. Stop.

Or maybe itll come on when Im scrolling through tweets at night before bed. Im not even clicking the links or responding to people. Im just scrolling down, or worse, pulling down with my thumb, reloading, reloading.

Or sometimes, I get caught in the melancholy of Tumblrs infinite scroll.

Are these experiences, as Stone would have it, love? The tech world generally measures how much you like a service by how much time you spend on it. So a lot of time equals love.

My own intuition is that this is not love. Its something much more technologically specific that MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll calls the machine zone.

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